Bistrica Pumped Storage: 250 Permit Requests in Six Months
The roughly 660-megawatt pumped storage plant on the Uvac awaits a construction permit and tender next year, and the upper lake level has been lowered to 810 meters.
Over the past six months, Elektroprivreda Srbije (EPS) has filed about 250 requests for conditions on various permits and approvals for the Bistrica pumped storage hydropower plant, EPS announced on October 24, 2026. The plant’s planned capacity is about 660 megawatts, and a construction permit is expected next year.
What did EPS say about the Bistrica permits?
Predrag Mladjenovic, EPS assistant executive director for generation, said in the statement that the project documentation is extensive and that much of it is already done:
A lot has been done so far on the Bistrica pumped storage project, and the documentation is very extensive. In the last six months alone, about 250 requests were submitted to obtain conditions for various types of permits and approvals from the competent authorities.
According to Mladjenovic, the Serbian government has adopted decisions declaring a public interest in expropriating land and buildings for the project, and the location conditions for the main facility, meaning the plant itself, are already secured. Exploratory work is under way on site.
The next steps are the construction permit and the tender. The permit is expected next year, when a tender for work on the main facility should also be announced. Preparatory work is due to begin in the coming period and will include rebuilding existing infrastructure and building what is missing. The statement gives no investment value, no financing source and no name of a contractor.
Where is Bistrica being built, and how much water will the reservoir hold?
The plant will sit between the Uvac and Lim rivers. On the Uvac, 7.5 kilometers downstream of the existing Radoinja dam, a new dam called Klak is planned, and its reservoir will hold 108 million cubic meters of water. The existing Potpec lake on the Lim will serve as the system’s lower reservoir.
Annual output is estimated at about 1,600 gigawatt-hours of electricity. Mladjenovic said Bistrica is the first pumped storage plant Serbia has built in more than four decades and the largest new energy capacity EPS is planning.
Why was the upper lake level lowered from 813 to 810 meters?
The project lowers the upper lake level by three meters compared with the original plan. Mladjenovic explained the reason this way:
The project envisages lowering the upper lake level from the originally planned 813 to 810 meters so that the waters of the Uvac and the Lim do not mix, which will allow fully functional and sustainable water supply for the citizens of Priboj. The construction of new access roads in the coming period will improve road infrastructure in the areas of Priboj, Prijepolje and Nova Varos.
The new access roads, then, are to be built across three municipalities. Mladjenovic also said the project has a positive effect on the local community in environmental and social terms, with legal environmental protection standards respected. He considers it certain that the new plant will affect economic development, tourism and the return of young professionals to the area.
What does the only pumped storage plant in Serbia show?
In its statement, EPS recalls that the country’s only existing pumped storage plant, Bajina Basta, was fully refurbished earlier this year after more than four decades of operation. The investment was worth 35 million euros, and EPS says it secured another 30 to 40 years of service.
Boris Jovanovic, head of the department for revitalization and modernization of the Bajina Basta hydropower and pumped storage plants, said the value of such plants was proven this summer, during the tropical heat, when Bajina Basta was the “key mainstay of Serbia’s power system.” He described how that looked in practice:
During the day, in the “solar hours” when energy on the market is cheapest, we filled Zaovine lake and stored energy for the time when it is needed and when market prices are considerably higher.
The same storage principle is meant to work at Bistrica, but only once the steps EPS named are completed: a construction permit and a tender for the main facility, both announced for next year.
